Cadavre Exquis

In January 2014, I had two main things happened to make the project ‘Cadavre Exquis’. I met wonderful artists through the exhibition ‘Crossing Boundaries’ which was held in Sydney Town Hall as the part of Chinese New Year Festival. And the theatre with the same name, Cadavre Exquis, as the part of Sydney Festival threw me the idea.

‘Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse)’ is a technique which collects the collage of words or images used among Surrealists based on an old parlour game. A player writes a phrase or draws an image and folds it to conceal the part of the writing or image allowing the potion of the end part for the next player. The next player continues this and passes it to the next player with same rule.

I adopted this rule for this creative collaboration process.

The collaborated works were done over consecutive months with each artist choosing a different month and a medium to create their art works. The first artist showed about the 1/10th part of their completed art work to the next artist. The next artist created their own art work based on what was shown and followed the same rule to the next artist. Each artist should not communicate about their works created. There was no limitation on mediums but the same medium works wouldn’t be in this one collaborated work. It is one piece of collaborated work and individual creative works at the same time.

As participating artists also have different cultural backgrounds (Korea, Indonesia, China-Australia, Mongol, Thailand), this added to the diversity of the creative collaboration process.

I initiated with the photograph work and the collaboration continued to Jayanto Damanik’ installation, David Mills’s sculpture, Ganbold (Gawaa) Lundaa’s mixed media, Somchai Charoen’s ceramics and ended to my video work.

At the end of the secret collaboration over a year, all works have exhibited in the Accelerator Gallery launched by Catherine Croll who curated ‘Crossing Boundaries’.